The Age of Lincoln and Cavour Comparative Perspectives on 19th-Century American and Italian Nation-Building

by Dal Lago, Enrico

• ISBN13: 9781137485427
• ISBN10: 1137485426
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-02-19
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

A comparison of the United States and Italy in the nineteenth century yields some remarkable similarities. In both instances, a relatively young country sought to cultivate liberal nationalist sentiments, economic progress, and technological modernization. At the same time, both Italy and the U.S. faced a direct threat to national unity in the form of a recalcitrant southern population, culminating in unprecedented bloodshed and social instability. While many historians have commented on these parallels, they have until now not been subject to a full scholarly study. Here, Enrico Dal Lago provides a nuanced analysis of this era by examining the ideologies of American abolitionism and Italian democratic nationalism, the public personae of Abraham Lincoln and Camillo Cavour, and the bitter conflicts that threatened both nations beginning in 1861. His study provides powerful new insights into the histories of two countries, both on their own terms and in the wider context of the nineteenth-century Euro-American world.

Author Biography

Enrico Dal Lago is Lecturer in American History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is author of Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815-1861 (2005), American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. 'Peculiar Institution' in International Perspective (2012), and William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform (2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Nation-Building in the Age of Lincoln and Cavour: Three Comparative Dimensions

PART I: NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ABOLITIONISM AND ITALIAN DEMOCRATIC NATIONALISM

1. Radicalism and Nationalism: Northern "Liberators" and Southern Laborers in the United States and Italy, 1830-1860

2. Purging Nations with Blood: John Brown, Pisacane, Social Justice, and Guerrilla Warfare

PART II: LINCOLN, CAVOUR, AND "PROGRESSIVE NATIONALISM"

3. Economic Progress, Markets, and Railways in Lincoln's and Cavour's Early Careers

4. "Progressive Nationalism," Politics, and National Unifications: Lincoln and Cavour after 1850

PART III: SECESSION, CIVIL WAR, AND NATION-BUILDING IN THE UNITED STATES AND ITALY

5. The Specter of Confederate Secession in Early Post-Unification Italy

6. Inner Civil Wars in the Confederate South and the Italian Mezzogiorno, 1861-1865